The demand for electric power has been rapidly increasing for the last few decades. Lagging investments to improve the power grid have led to a rise in congestion, equipment overloads, and system disturbances. The power grid has been pushed to its technical limits. In addition, the electricity grid is old and has started showing signs of aging. Increasing dependence by industrial and commercial users, and society in general, on electric power has compelled utilities to take measures that ensure high reliability of their power system apparatus.
Information on parameters of the power grid such as the temperature of an asset or the amount of current flowing through an asset is necessary in order to effectively maintain the system. The lack of such information can lead to catastrophic failures and major blackouts. However, the power grid stretches over thousands of miles making it too costly and impractical to monitor the system using conventional methods.
An increasing thrust towards implementing a smart grid and improving the asset monitoring infrastructure inside substations as well as on the transmission and distribution network has led the utilities to start adopting smarter sensing technologies. Advancements in wireless sensor networks are making the prospect of monitoring such a large scale system more feasible. Research in this area has led to the development of low power protocols, meshed topologies, increased distance of transmission, and overall highly reliable networks.
The technology for monitoring conditions on the power grid has not kept pace with the advancement in communication protocols. Nearly all conventional sensors are large, bulky, and expensive. For example, most sensors for monitoring the current through an asset work through magnetic induction and utilize closed-core structures. The closed-core structure requires the sensors to be clamped around the asset. The labor required to clamp these devices is costly. Furthermore, the bulkiness of these sensors and the need for the devices to be physically clamped onto the monitored asset precludes their use in situations where the geometry of the monitored asset does not allow such clamping.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to provide a low-cost, compact solution for monitoring conditions on the power grid that would not be limited by the geometry of the asset or assets being measured.